Steven Soderbergh: Retiring at 50

If you want to retire at age 50, it probably helps to register a major professional success at the age of 26. Movie director Steven Soderbergh attained the latter feat in 1989, with the release of the critically adored and popular “sex, lies, and videotape,” and now he’s aiming for the former.

Nicolas Genin

Farewell, movie houses; hello, museums.

Having directed more than two dozen feature films in the last 25 years, including the “Ocean’s” trilogy, “Out of Sight,” and “Contagion,” Soderbergh explains to the Wall Street Journal’s Don Steinberg that he’s through making movies, or at least movies for theatrical release. “If I wanted to make something again, I think it would be either long-form TV or something that really isn’t designed to be seen outside of a museum,” Soderbergh says, somewhat ominously, “something that functions more like a Matthew Barney piece than it does like a traditional movie.”

Soderbergh has publicly mulled retirement before, in 2011, but this time it appears to be serious. His presumably final films will be “Side Effects,” which opens in theaters next week, and the Liberace biopic “Behind the Candelabra”—with Michael Douglas as Liberace, for heaven’s sake—which will run on HBO in May.

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